Lena Reinhard - This Is Bigger Than Us: Building a Future for Open Source (JSConf EU 2014)

Who?

Github: lenareinhard

Project: Hoodie

Date: October 2014

Why?

Lena Reinhard cited multiple reasons for leaving open source due to the culture of these communities. After speaking at JSConf EU 2014, she has had very few commits (which continue to decrease each year) and she no longer contributes to Hoodie (despite serving as its core contributor in 2014) or any other public project. Lena hasn’t been active on GitHub for the past 6 years.

She gave examples of threats, mobbing, sexism, along with other topics. She provided the timeline below, which shows an increase in sexist incidents within open source from 2000 to 2014 (2:43).

In addition to this culture, Lena also believed that there was an extreme lack of support for minority communities. She explained how those that spoke out were silenced and this silence just made it harder to improve the culture in open source communities.

“Every one of us has had a different life experience and perceives the world differently, thus, we need to take care as well about the intersections of these groups.” (10:15)

For reference:

Interventions

Lena strongly advocates everyone to acknowledge what she believes to be “broken culture” and to listen to what everyone needs to say. She believes the lack of support within open source is what encourages problematic incidents (due to sexism, racism, etc.) to happen. Lena hopes the open source community will become more supportive and inclusive in the future, else she expects the open source community to only decrease in size.